With LONGLEGS, writer/director Oz Perkins has created an original tale of horror set in the 1990s while staying true to familiar tropes. There’s an unhinged suspect, a series of family slaughters that don’t ring true to a murder/suicide scenario, and a neophyte FBI agent at the center of the case in ways she didn’t see coming. The result is an eerie film that draws its intensity from how quickly normality can disappear into terror as it presents a looming rural landscape that is empty of life.
The FBI agent is Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), a thoroughly composed introvert without a trace of shyness. No, she would really rather not come into meet the family of her bluff and garrulous boss, Agent Carter (Blair Underwood), but does so anyway when he insists, answering questions about her work from Carter’s daughter (Ava Kelders) without a trace of condescension, and agreeing to attend her upcoming birthday party with neither enthusiasm nor regret. It is an unnerving performance of a character that is obsessed with her work and unwilling or unable to connect with other people. Fortunately, she’s very good at her job, easily cracking the code that the suspected serial killer, Longlegs (Nicolas Cage) has left at the scene of every murder for the past 30 years, and then connecting the hidden patterns within the coded messages, and then correlating them to sigils from a volume describing the nine circles of Hell. She is not, however, able to explain how Longlegs got into the homes without leaving any fingerprints or DNA or signs of forced entry.
A clue to Harker’s odd personality is revealed in calls to her mother (Alicia Witt), a recluse who responds to Harker calling her mom by asking who it is, despite Harker being an only child. Another is Harker’s psychic abilities, established when she correctly deduces where a suspect in hiding amid a group of identical houses. Perkins uses the latter to play with reality. Are the cutaways we see flashbacks from Harker’s memory, psychic visions of the present, or something else altogether? It’s a trope that is particularly effective when Harker visits the only survivor (Kiernan Shipka) of a Longlegs murder. In an interview that begins simply enough with a professional questioning of the traumatized young woman currently residing in a mental health facility, images flash as the victim loosens up, moving from barely verbal to almost bubbly as she describes how it would be, in her words, peachy to follow the killer’s orders, be it to destroy Harker or herself. Shipka is brilliant, as is Monroe’s reaction, composed as always on the surface, but registering alarm that leaves her unsettled, a duality that will grow as the story progresses.
And now we come to Mr. Cage, once again proving that he is a, ahem, national treasure who transcends mere acting by re-imagining the thespian arts into a sui generis phenomenon forged by his fevered imagination. We are given only glimpses of his face for the first part of the film, the hands moving fluidly as he addresses little girls in a sing-song voice that is a screeching falsetto. The face, when we finally see it, is unnaturally pale, framed by a mop of floating white hair. Prosthetic makeup creates a meaty, porcine face that is a cross between Bette Davis in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE and Tiny Tim with a soupçon of Miss Piggy to complete the nightmare. It is Mr. Cage’s affect that prevents this improbable physiognomy from being clownish. There is menace in the fluttering of the hands and the smile that is a nascent leer. The eccentric enunciation bespeaks a savage break with reality that the mild manner somehow serves to magnify. This is an icon of evil in the making.
Perkins makes isolation itself terrifying. Harker lives in a log cabin with huge windows in the middle of nowhere. Even before there is a mysterious knock on the door in the middle of the night, he has used his camera in subtly effective ways to telegraph the dangers inherent in such a situation, the vulnerability of having no one near enough to hear a scream and rush to help. The colors are muted, the volume kept deliberately low as we wait for the inevitable without being sure of just what that entails.
LONGLEGS produces a sense of visceral dread that barely requires the gore, both actual and implied, that punctuate the film. By the end, Perkins has deftly removed any sense of safety, or even reality, from Harker’s life, and left us mightily, deliciously discomfited.
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